Chase But Don't Discover What Matters

Michael

From what I have read in Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels, it would appear that she agrees with the Habermasian notion that, “although there may have been a desire to perceive the sphere of the family circle as independent, as cut off from all connection with society, and as the domain of pure humanity, it was, of course, dependent on the sphere of labor and of the commodity exchange” (Public Sphere 46). I think this justifies a need to place an equal importance on “networks of representations” as is placed on “financial resources,” as Langland states: “My perspective emphasizes the close imbrications of economic conditions with cultural constructions, where financial resources cannot position individuals more irrevocably than do the networks of representations through which they negotiate their daily lives” (7). I think this move provides a useful way to approach class problems in our current society where there is a heavy emphasis on suppressing issues of poverty, out of sight out of mind. I think that there is a definite conditioning process that encourages us to think that poverty only happens in third world countries. This conveniently lets us ignore our civic responsibilities at home, allowing us to believe in the principles of dog-eat-dog competition in order to dissuade a questioning of the system’s core values.

I think in our time visual representations work just like the placement of kitchens and dinning rooms, and the maids invisible chamber cleanings that characterize the Victorian Age: “Like kitchen odors, bodily evidences were not to intrude upon refined senses” (44). In my project I would like to look at visual representations to discover how “plots are informed by a culture’s ideologies, its assessment of value and meaning and possibility” (4).

Right now a Chase commercial (I think, I’m going off memory here) comes to mind, where there is a black couple expecting a baby. After the couple purchases baby gear they realize they need to get more because they are expecting triplets. When most people might walk away from this commercial feeling a progressive sense of pride that an attractive, middle class, black couple is being represented on television, I of course have a different take: “Oh great, now black people are being actively encouraged to drown in debt as well.” In an astoundingly subtle way, this commercial trivializes both representations of black people and our nations economic problems.

However, I am willing to admit that the real problem with popular visual representations is not this literal translation that I bring out, but the general subconscious acceptance of credit card companies. It is because they are visually represented everywhere that they can blend in with the landscape, or as Langland says about representations: “Such signifying practices, then, formulate, transmit, and reproduce the ideologies of a culture through the production of subjects. This is the process through which particular and local beliefs of a group become naturalized as truth” (4). Yet what is at risk in these truths? What problems do these truths purposely conceal?